Mathers says the figure protects a night invocation and drives away spirits guarding treasure.
- Planetary group
- ♄ Saturn
- Mathers figure
- 15
- Printed plate
- III
- Text anchor
- Deuteronomy 10:17
Mathers assigns black and lead to this planetary group. The crop documents his printed linework; it does not reproduce the color or material described elsewhere in the edition.
What Mathers’s caption claims
Mathers says the figure protects a night invocation and drives away spirits guarding treasure.
Within the Saturn collection, this places figure 15 among themes of constraint, adversity, night work, protection, and destructive claims.
Inscription, names, and script
Deuteronomy 10:17: A great God, a mighty, and a terrible.
IHVH appears at the cross angles; ALVH and four angel names occupy the square structure.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a cross keyed by the four letters of IHVH. Around it, a square distributes ALVH and the angel names Arehanah, Rakhaniel, Roelhaiphar, and Noaphiel. At the edge, the biblical phrase forms the outer ring.
Mathers plate and witness differences
The editor turns several compact Hebrew groups into named layers: divine name, secondary name, then four angels. That hierarchy is useful, but the particular spellings belong to his reading of difficult letterforms.
Plate III is an artifact of Mathers’s 1889 arrangement. His preface and final note say that he compared differing manuscripts and restored difficult Hebrew and magical characters. Sloane 2731 and Lansdowne 1203 remain distinct manuscript objects; this printed crop should not stand in for either one.
WORKED EXAMPLE
A diagram reading of figure 15
Move from cross to square to circle. The cross divides IHVH among four directions, the square supplies a second ordered enclosure, and the perimeter verse states magnitude and terror. The claimed defense is therefore expressed as nested ranks rather than as a pictorial shield.
View this figure in sequence
The Saturn collection contains 7 figures, numbered 11–17 in the 1889 edition.